Microservices has the power to transform your old monolithic applications in a more efficient application that is both secure and flexible.
What Are Microservices?
Microservices is an approach to software architecture that builds a large, complex application from multiple small components that each perform a single function, such as authentication, notification, or payment processing. Each microservice is a distinct unit within the software development project, with its own codebase, infrastructure, and database. The microservices work together, communicating through web APIs or messaging queues to respond to incoming events.
Videos on Microservices
Why Microservices?
Microservices take a complex monolithic application and turn it into a set of independent services, which are faster to develop and much easier to understand and maintain. Each services can also be developed separately by a team that is focused just on that service. Microservices also make continuous deployment easier, because each microservice can be deployed independently.
7 Benefits of Microservices
Load Balancing
Safely and independently scale out individual app components using advanced load balancing
Faster Development
Update app components on their own schedules without worrying about dependencies on other components
Flexible Deployment
Deploy app components piece-by-piece without affecting other systems
Simpler
Develop and maintain more easily
Cache
Improve performance while reducing load on your app with flexible content caching
Troubleshooting
Easily identify failures in service
Agnostic
Run in containers, on your existing hardware, or in the cloud
Pros & Cons of Microservices
A microservices architecture is a revolutionary step in application development. Like any other technology, it has its pros and cons. The following is a summary of strengths and vulnerabilities, which can affect application performance and design.
- Developers have the freedom to independently develop and deploy services, resulting in faster decision making
- Due to the small size and autonomy of microservices, a microservices‑based approach results in shorter development cycles, as different teams can be implementing different services simultaneously – dependency between teams is usually eliminated
- Microservices can easily be deployed on containers, resulting in less overhead and improved portability across different environments
- Developers can embrace modern DevOps practices such as automated CI/CD pipelines, because microservices integrate easily with CI/CD tools
- It’s easy to scale apps, “right‑sizing” them to the level of demand, as each service is usually elastic
- Microservices are easier to build, test and maintain
- Services are organized around business capabilities
- Developers can adopt the technology most suited for a specific service
- Fault isolation is easier – If one microservice fails, others continue to function
- A microservices architecture involves added complexity, as developers have to mitigate fault tolerance, reduce network latency, deal with varying programming languages, and load balance across multiple services
- Testing microservices can be cumbersome and complicated, because of their distributed nature
- Increasing the number of microservices in an application increases the effort required for effective integration and management
- Dealing with multiple databases can be painful
What Is a Virtual Machine?
A virtual machine is a computer file, typically called an image, that behaves like an actual computer. In short, it’s a computer within a computer. Entire operating systems can be run within one window of an existing computer. Each microservice is a container, and these containers are often run on multiple cloud virtual machines, or VMs. Most cloud providers use VMs as the basis for their Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings.
Ingenious & the Fabric Model
Here is a great use case: Ingenious is a photo‑sharing demo app created by NGINX to show the Fabric Model approach to application development. The app is designed to allow the user to login to a personalized account, and then store, view and delete their own pictures. It also includes a blog in which users can view the latest news and updates within the application.
Learn more about this project on Github
